Three UK begins its 4G LTE roll out, slowly and quietly

The day many UK based iPhone owners is finally upon us, kind of. Three has begun the rollout of its fledgling 4G LTE network by way of a soft launch right now limited to just a few thousand customers in London. It will expand, but as Three confirmed to Android Central, there's a plan and a reason:

The reason for this, Three tell us, is to ensure the smoothest possible rollout for its 4G network, though a side-effect of this staged rollout has been a stream of tweets from disgruntled Three subscribers. The carrier previous committed to a launch in London, Manchester and Birmingham in December, but made no mention of its plans to restrict this to a small number of customers at the get-go.

The launch rollout was promised for London, Birmingham and Manchester during December, so if you're not seeing it right now there's no need to freak out too much. December has plenty of days left for things to progress. Access so far seems to have been random, so we've no indication of what data speeds folks may be seeing.

Three has promised an official release soon to clarify the situation, so we'll know more soon. In the meantime if you're one of the lucky few to have jumped on to the new network, let us know what speeds you're getting in the comments below.

Three offers good HSPA+ speeds as it is. In a lot of areas you'll see constant 20Mbps+ download speeds which is plenty good enough. It's also why a lot of folks are excited to see what LTE is like from Three

I was supposed to be part of the "soft rollout". They even sent me a new SIM card and told me to wait for a software update. Then the idea was for me to fill out a daily diary to give them updates on how I found the service. I received the SIM card over a week ago but so far no 4G has come spinning into my phone. Will keep you posted.

The 4G roll out won't require a new sim as Three have already said (http://blog.three.co.uk/2013/08/29/get-ready-for-4g/). A simple sim update is all that is required, similar to the recent O2 update to rectify the LTE - 4G on the iPhones signal strength. Like people have mentioned before, stop stressing it's free !!!

You are right but if you are in the pilot scheme then you do - have no idea why. Spoke to Three today and they said Apple will be pushing an update at some point before the 16th December for those in the pilot scheme. What seems weird is if some people, not in this scheme , get access to 4g first. In the blurb that I got, Three mentioned that the scheme would go live to ordinary customers in January.